What Happened in Jenin?

As violence continues in Israel and
Palestine, so does debate over what exactly happened during
Israel's invasion of the Jenin refugee camp. Israel barred
journalists and aid workers alike from the camp during the
invasions, but as access restrictions have eased, human
rights groups have issued graphic reports detailing evidence
of human rights violations by the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) and possible war crimes.

Some media accounts, too,
have vividly described the damage across the West Bank: One
New York Times story (4/11/02) reported that "it is safe to
say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future
Palestinian state-- roads, schools, electricity pylons,
water pipes, telephone lines-- has been devastated." Lately,
however, much U.S. coverage and commentary has passed over
investigations of whether the IDF committed widespread
rights abuses in favor of narrower-- and less meaningful--
wrangling over whether or not the IDF committed a
"massacre."

Amnesty International has emphasized that
"there is no legal definition in international law of the
word 'massacre'," and that using the term in reference to
Jenin "is not helpful" for determining whether the IDF
violated human rights there (AI press release, 4/29/02).
Nevertheless, the "massacre" question has become central to
many journalists' approach to the story-- even when they
don't have a working definition of the word.

One
illustration of how poorly media have thought through the
concept came when CNBC's Chris Matthews (Hardball, 4/16/02)
asked chief PLO representative to the U.S. Hasan Abdel
Rahman whether he had evidence of a massacre in Jenin.
Rahman turned the tables, asking, "Well, first of all,
what's a massacre?" With disquieting vagueness, Matthews
replied, "Oh, a couple hundred people or civilians or ten or
20 civilians."

Most early estimates in the U.S. press of
the number of Palestinians killed in Jenin ranged from 100
to 200. Media were caught up in the implications for
Israel's image, declaring Jenin a "diplomatic and public
relations minefield" (CBS Evening News, 4/24/02). As initial
excavation work got underway, however, those original
figures were downgraded, and the question for many news
outlets became whether Palestinians had manufactured
"massacre" claims. In fact, many of those early casualty
figures had been provided by Israeli officials. "The Israeli
army estimates that it killed 100 to 200 people in eight
days of fighting," reported CBS Evening News on April 12. On
ABC's Nightline (4/11/02), Dave Marash reported that Israeli
defense forces "estimate 100 Palestinian fighters were
killed there, but refused to say where the bodies are, and
they continue to bar news people from the camp."

Once
Human Rights Watch (HRW) gained access to the camp, the
group was able to document 52 people killed by the IDF,
including 22 civilians, many of whom "were killed willfully
or unlawfully" (press release, 5/3/02). HRW's report on
Jenin didn't focus on the sheer numbers of dead, however.
Instead, the bulk of the report catalogued a pattern of
serious human rights violations in Jenin, some of which the
group says may be war crimes. The abuses include attacking
and killing medical personnel, using civilians as human
shields, failing to distinguish between military targets and
civilian homes, and causing "extensive and disproportionate
destruction of the civilian infrastructure"-- so much so
that more than a quarter of Jenin's population is now
homeless.

Amnesty International announced similar findings
in a May 4 report, "The Heavy Price of Israeli Incursions,"
which condemned the IDF invasions of the Occupied
Territories as collective punishment of Palestinians. The
report documents "unlawful killings, destruction of property
and arbitrary detention [and] torture and ill-treatment" by
the IDF, and states that many of these actions violated
human rights and international law.

The HRW and Amnesty
reports were very direct in their conclusions, but some
journalists nonetheless managed to miss the point. On NPR's
May 4 "Weekend Edition," anchor Scott Simon asked NPR
analyst Daniel Schorr to explain what the newly released
reports said about Jenin. Schorr said:

"Human Rights Watch
has found that there was no massacre as such. Yes, there
were a couple of things that were not very nice. They found
Israelis destroyed more buildings than they absolutely had
to. The Israelis say they had to 'cause they thought they
were booby trapped, but Human Rights Watch says sometimes
human beings were used as human shields. Maybe. Some things
happened which were not terribly, terribly nice, and I'm
sure they happened a lot. But if the question is raised that
'Was there a deliberate massacre of civilians in Jenin?' the
answer seems to come out no. "

It's hard to imagine a
mainstream U.S. commentator characterizing civilians being
"killed willfully or unlawfully" as "a couple of things that
were not very nice"-- if the perpetrators were an official
U.S. enemy, like Serbia or Iraq. And, of course, in large
part it's up to Schorr and his media colleagues to decide
which questions are raised about Jenin.

Some of those
colleagues gave up even on the narrow question of a
massacre, taking the troubling stance that the facts may
never be known, or might not even matter. As CBS Evening
News correspondent Mark Phillips put it on April 18, "Did a
wholesale massacre take place here? In terms of the
hostility between Palestinians and Israelis, it almost
doesn't matter. Perceptions are what count, and Jenin has
already become another reason for mistrust, hatred and
revenge."

The following night, CNN's Christiane Amanpour
reached a similar conclusion: "Jenin will remain for the
Palestinians a place of myth and legend and perhaps even a
place of revenge." The same day, NPR's Julie McCarthy
commented that "The story of Jenin is set to live on in
memory and myth." On April 20, CBS's Phillips still didn't
know who to trust: "What happened in Jenin depends on who
you believe."

Of course, the job of a journalist is to
separate myth from fact, and to investigate conflicting
claims to see which are true. Even when journalists did try
to report what happened at Jenin, however, that reporting
was sometimes sanitized beyond recognition. Consider this
description from the New York Times on April 21: "As Israeli
forces pursued militants, civilians continued getting in the
way and dying as a result."

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